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Rolling Hills: More Than A Golf Course To Illahee Community

When County Commissioner Josh Brown called Illahee Community
Club member and longtime community volunteer Jim Aho Tuesday to
tell him the county was about to own the 107 acre Rolling Hills
Golf Course, Aho almost couldn’t believe it.

He still can’t.

“To be honest with you, with the financial climate we were
thinking this isn’t ever going to happen,” Aho said Wednesday.
“Having this come out of the blue was unbelievable. I still have a
hard time thinking this is going to happen.”

The Illahee community has had its eye on the golf course for
years, primarily because of the stormwater that surges through the
course during heavy rains and into the Illahee Creek, causing
sediment to pile up in the culvert below Illahee Road. These storm
surges also discharge a large amount of muddy-looking water into
the bay. The community has also been concerned the course might one
day be developed into housing, which would significantly increase
the density within Illahee, and change the feel of the small
community.

Course owners Don Rasmussen and Kerma Peterson had been
interested in selling the course for years, but they also wanted to
make sure if the course was sold it didn’t fall into the hands of
developers and be transformed from a sprawling golf course into
clusters of homes.

They had talked with the county about trying to sell it so the
land was public, but the business partners were asking for $5
million (this is four or more years ago). The county didn’t have
the money, and negotiations fell off.

Around the same time, according to Aho, the Illahee community,
including the Port of Illahee, looked at ways to solve the
sedimentation problem at the base of Illahee Creek. Using a
Centennial Clean Water grant from the Washington State Department
of Ecology, the port learned the sediment pollution problem that
affected the creek and subsequently Puget Sound was the result of
the housing developments to the north of the golf course. The
proposed solution was to use the golf course property to filter
that water into the ground.

With this knowledge, and the realization that the county had no
immediate plans to acquire the course, the port set out to explore
grant opportunities to try and get enough money to buy Rolling
Hills. Port commissioners didn’t have much success.

But that doesn’t mean they gave up. They continued to work to
implement some of the suggestions in the plan drafted by Parametrix
— the Bremerton firm hired by the port with the
ecology money it received. The plan, Surface Water Management Plan
for Illahee Creek, is the result of a comprehensive analysis of the
Illahee watershed basin. It identifies the problems in the
watershed and how to fix them.

While executing the suggested improvements in the plan will take
millions of dollars to accomplish, one of the bigger hurdles the
community faced was acquiring the golf course.

The port is also considering the purchase of 15 acres of
developable land from local developer Jim James. James had planned
to build homes in a development he was calling Timbers Edge. The
community appealed the project numerous times, and now James has
agreed to offer the land to the port.
That deal is still pending, and port commissioners have been asking
for direction from port taxpayers to see if constituents want the
port to buy the land.

But with the golf course deal now penciled out between the
county and Rasmussen and Peterson, community volunteers are feeling
rejuvenated and are anxious to start the conversation with the
county about implementing stormwater controls.

The surface water management plan details ways in which
stormwater controls can be added to mitigate the run-off that
floods the stream and sends sediment out into Port Orchard Passage.
When these large flushes happen, they also damage the habitat,
including impacting the salmon in the stream, according creek
analysis.

Commissioner Brown acknowledged it won’t be cheap to solve the
stormwater problems facing the creek and subsequent community. But
the county has already made a significant step in the right
direction by acquiring the property and maintaining it as open
space.

“This is going to be a great opportunity for us to look at how
can we look at implementing low impact development techniques,” he
said. “It costs a lot of money to fix big problems, but that
doesn’t mean we can’t start chipping away.”

And with the strong spirit of volunteerism in Illahee, Brown is
confident a number of smaller solutions — like rain garden
installations and other low impact development projects — will be
done at little cost to the county.

“I think this is going to open a lot of doors and
possibilities,” he said.

Telling Brown “you did what I think we all thought was
impossible,” Aho congratulated the board for working out a deal
that will benefit the community on multiple levels.